Two local environmental activists defend state’s coastal plan, without reading it.
By Ken Gale/Special to The Malibu Times
A guest editorial in The Malibu Times last week, which lambasted critics of the California Coastal Commission’s Local Coastal Plan (LCP) for Malibu, appears to have been the launching of a campaign for a City Council seat next April by biologist and ecology activist Robert Roy Van de Hoek.
“I’m planning to do it,” said Van de Hoek, about running for City Council in an interview Friday. Van de Hoek is co-chair of the Sierra Club California Coast & Ocean Committee as well as a marine biology teacher. Asked how he would find the time for the council, he said, “I’ll find the time. It will be good to have a biologist and an educator on the City Council.”
He and fellow Malibu resident Marcia Hanscom were among five environmentalists who signed the editorial. However, both of the two Malibu-based activists admitted they had not actually read the full LCP before publishing their broadside.
Nonetheless, they accused critics of the Coastal Commission LCP of making “inflammatory and groundless claims” against the Coastal Commission, and they called for a lowering of the “rhetoric and misleading statements.”
Specifically, they attacked claims by many City Council members that the Coastal Commission “has taken away local authority,” is not “susceptible to reason” and “will not listen to the people of Malibu.”
All false claims, said the editorial.
“It’s clear that they didn’t read the LCP,” responded Councilmember Tom Hasse.
The editorial said a new LCP would benefit Malibu. “Well, duh,” said Hasse, “That’s why we’ve been working on one for the last five or six years.”
The editorial also said Malibu officials reneged on an agreement to work with the Coastal Commission on an LCP last year. But Councilmember Sharon Barovsky, who, with Councilmember Jeff Jennings, met with Coastal commissioners last fall–said, “Had he (Van de Hoek) bothered to ask, he would have discovered memos of the meeting which clearly show the city did its level best to work with the Coastal Commission to bring forward an LCP that would best serve Malibu residents as well as the larger community.”
Barovsky, who defeated Van de Hoek in the council race last November, wrote a response to the editorial that appears in The Malibu Times this week (see page 4).
The three other people who signed the editorial are leaders of other prestigious environmental groups. They are Susan Jordan, director of the California Coastal Protection Network; Joel Reynolds, senior attorney for the National Resources Defense Council; and Mark Gold, executive director of Heal the Bay.
Gold told The Malibu Times there was never any discussion of politics or of Van de Hoek’s intention to run for City Council. “It’s absolutely critical for Heal the Bay to not get involved in politics, we’re just not supposed to at all,” he said. But he added, “Let’s face it, a lot of things we work on as an organization are controversial in Malibu.”
Gold noted it was highly unusual for the five signatories to come together on a single issue, “but I think what was different this time was that the coastal resources in Malibu are just so extraordinary that you have this unique coalition of groups signing off, saying, ‘Let’s look at this more as an opportunity rather than a reason to fight.'”
Although he said he had “not read it completely yet,” Van de Hoek gave some idea of the kinds of changes he would seek in the LCP, as well as, perhaps, his priorities as a member of City Council.
His issues had nothing to do with the furor over the past few weeks over rezoning that would allow hotels in the Civic Center and at Malibu Bluffs Park across from Pepperdine University among other things.
Van de Hoek’s concerns about those portions of the LCP he had read focused on very specific ecological issues–sea lions and birds, for example.
“The maps in (the LCP) show that sea lions are present on the coast and indicate places where they come up on the beaches to rest,” he noted. “But the plan doesn’t say that there are harbor seals and other kinds of seals here, too. So I’ll be offering very constructive criticism in regard to how we take care of marine life in our community and designating ESHAs (Environmentally Sensitive Habitat Areas).”
As for the Civic Center, where the Coastal Commission draft would change the zoning from “small business” to “visitor serving,” Van de Hoek said, “The whole area would be better to be an expanded and restored wetlands, and that would be visitor serving.”
Visitor serving usually implies restaurants, overnight lodging and stores. Van de Hoek, explaining how his vision would be visitor serving, said, “It would be very pro-business oriented in terms of making a high-quality environment place for tourists. But more than that–don’t get focused on tourists, pleas –it’s for the residents, for education of future generations of children that live here in Malibu, with boardwalks and walking paths through there.”
In a separate interview Friday, Hanscom, executive director of the Wetlands Action Network, said she had only started to read the Coastal Commission LCP draft, but planned to read it over the weekend in preparation for a commission staff public hearing in Malibu on Tuesday of this week.
She also said she had never read either of the two LCP drafts that were prepared by Malibu but rejected by the commission. She complained that she was told a copy of the city’s LCP would cost $47, “and we’re a nonprofit group that doesn’t have that kind of resources.” On top of that, she said, “There were no public hearings on the LCP draft that was submitted by the city manager.”
Told, however, that there had been several public hearings (three council sub-committee and two full City Council hearings), she said she had never been informed of those meetings and that, “I have asked over and over for Wetlands Action Network to be added to the list of information whenever anything related to coastal planning comes up.”
“I think they’re both still out there somewhere in the wetlands,” Hasse commented about the two activists.